In general, anger is an emotion with a high arousal level, while sadness is an emotion with a low arousal level. Emotional arousal theory suggests that different emotional responses can activate different levels of cognition. According to Lerner and Keltner, emotions are associated with cognitive assessment, implying that emotions can motivate people to estimate and assess future events and influence their judgment of risk. Scholars believe that COVID-19 has caused various emotional reactions and psychological problems, such as anxiety and fear.

Therefore, it is particularly important to quantitatively characterize the dynamic trends in risk perception on social networks.Ĭompared with normal situations, public health emergencies can trigger a range of stress responses, including higher levels of anxiety and other negative emotions. This dynamic trend is an important consideration in public health emergencies and risk-management decisions, yet it is easily overlooked in the actual emergency-management system construction. With the passage of time and changes in the information environment, public risk perceptions have changed accordingly. People can get more risk-related information and personal experiences from other users, which in turn may stimulate their awareness. Social media provides an optimal environment for sharing information quickly and vividly, making it more tangible and interactive. Prior research has suggested that the use of social media during public emergencies plays a key role in shaping public risk perception. Social networks have become an important dissemination platform for COVID-19 information and have attracted a lot of attention from emergency-management agencies.

Effective measurement and monitoring of the level of public risk perception and its characteristics will have important implications for infectious disease emergency management. Therefore, it has been suggested that government understanding and orientation to public risk perception is a key part of the emergency management of public health events. It also illustrated that the risk perception process, which combines information collection, selection, and understanding, can have an impact on the public’s behavior in response to the emergency. A qualitative study showed that public risk perception and subsequent protective behavior change when they are influenced by relevant information. Risk perception refers to the subjective judgments people make about the characteristics and severity of risks. Behavioral decisions often depend on people’s predictions and perceptions of risk. In order to reduce the transmission of COVID-19, public protective behavior plays an extremely important role in public health emergencies management. It points out the need for health communication strategy makers to consider the public’s risk perception and emotional expression characteristics during public health emergencies. (5) Conclusion: This study provides a theoretical basis for more targeted epidemic crisis interventions. We also found that there is a significant response relationship between positive emotion, angry emotion, and risk perception. As for the characteristics of evolution, public risk perception had been at a high level since the outbreak stage, and there was a sudden increase and a gradual decrease in the level of public risk perception. (4) Results: The results revealed that the public expresses significantly more dread words than unknown words in shaping the risk perception process. Furthermore, drawing on arousal theory, we constructed dynamic response relationships between emotion type (angry, fearful, sad, positive, and neutral) and risk perceptions by a vector autoregressive (VAR) model. We also analyzed the characteristics of risk perception at different stages of the crisis life cycle. (3) Methods: Utilizing text-mining techniques and deep-learning algorithms, risk perception was calculated from two dimensions (dread and unknown) as well as the emotional expression characteristics of 185,025 posts from 10 January 2020 to 20 March 2020 on Sina Weibo. (2) Objective: This study developed a public risk perception measurement method for social media data to understand the dynamic characteristics of risk perception and emotional expression during public health emergencies. Appropriate risk perception is important to enhance beliefs and promote emergency management response to public health events. (1) Background: Risk perception is a key factor in motivating people to comply with preventive behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Free hazard perception test 2013